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Some Notes on Faulkner's Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

M. Gidley
M. Gidley
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Extract

Carvel Collins's collection of Faulkner's Early Prose and Poetry, containing mainly material written between 1919 and 1922, with one or two items from 1925, introduces the reader to a young author who is not only concerned with questions of his craft but also engaged by several of the dominant aesthetic, intellectual and critical arguments of his day. Let me briefly list some of those engagements: Faulkner's review of Conrad Aiken's Turns and Movies and his renderings of Symbolist poetry demonstrate his interest in the proper language of poetry; the essay ‘On Criticism’ presents him sparring with notions of what good criticism could and should achieve; in his piece on Eugene O'Neill he expresses surprise that O'Neill had chosen to write first about the sea rather than about the more familiar land, and of W. A. Percy he says ‘like every man who…ever lived, he is the victim of his age’ (p. 72)—comments which hint at thoughts on the disparity between life and art (a recurrent subject in his poems), which was a chief critical point in the feverish debates of the time between the emerging ‘literary radicals’ like Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks and the ‘new humanists’, such as Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt. Also, in ‘American Drama: Inhibitions’, Faulkner stresses the importance of native subject-matter for the American writer, taking ‘the old Mississippi river days’ and ‘the romantic growth of the railroads’ (44) as examples. In the same essay, like Brooks and H. L. Mencken before him, he points out the comparative richness of the American tongue: thus it is no surprise to learn that Mencken's The American Language (1919) is listed in the Appendix to William Faulkner's Library—A Catalogue as one of the books Phil Stone ordered with his younger friend ‘in mind’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , July 1970 , pp. 91 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1970

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References

page 91 note 1 Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1962. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

page 91 note 2 For accounts of the controversy see May's, Henry F.The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time 1912–1917 (New York: Knopf, 1957)Google Scholar, especially the chapter on ‘Radicals’, and Spiller, R. E. et al. , The Literary History of The United States, vol. II (New York: Macmillan, 1948), pp. 1137–56.Google Scholar

page 91 note 3 See Brooks, , ‘America's Coming-of-Age’ (1915)Google Scholar, reprinted in Three Essays on America (New York: Dutton, 1934), pp. 22–4Google Scholar; also Mencken, , The American Language (New York: Knopf, 1919)Google Scholar, especially the chapter entitled ‘The Future of the Language: English or American’.

page 92 note 1 Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1964, p. 6. The Appendix is arranged alphabetically by author and the catalogue itself alphabetically by author under each of the national literatures represented.

page 92 note 2 Soldiers' Pay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938), p. 48.Google Scholar All page references are to this edition.

page 92 note 3 New York: Liveright, 1927. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

page 92 note 4 For example, Waggoner, Hyatt in William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1959), p. 9.Google Scholar

page 92 note 5 London: Chatto and Windus, 1925. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

page 93 note 1 The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), passim, but see particularly chapter 16.Google Scholar

page 93 note 2 Quoted by Weber, Brom in Sherwood Anderson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 43, 1964), p. 12.Google Scholar

page 93 note 3 New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927.

page 94 note 1 New York: Modern Library, 1946, p. 465.

page 94 note 2 Ibid. p. 362.

page 94 note 3 New York: Random House, 1948, p. 147.

page 94 note 4 See discussions of motion in stasis and the images for it in the following: Zink, Karl, ‘Flux and the Frozen Moment: The Imagery of Stasis in Faulkner's Prose’, PMLA, LXXI (06 1956), 285–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slatoff, Walter J., Quest for Failure: A Study of William Faulkner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960)Google Scholar, passim; Adams, Richard P., Faulkner: Myth and Motion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), passim.Google Scholar

page 95 note 1 Appendix, A Catalogue, p. 125. Leda (London: Chatto and Windus, 1920).Google Scholar

page 95 note 2 Oxford: Blackwell, 1925.

page 95 note 3 ‘Faulkner's “Portrait of the Artist”’, Mississippi Quarterly, xix (Summer 1966), 121–31.Google Scholar

page 95 note 4 Perhaps Faulkner was inspired to this allusion—as Mrs Warren (ibid. p. 123) also believes—by Israfel (1926), Harvey Allen's recently published biography of Poe. Or he might have been reminded by Allen's introduction to the one-volume edition of Poe's works (1927) that he had in his own library.

page 95 note 5 See A Green Bough (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1933).Google Scholar

page 95 note 6 For Faulkner's debts to Eliot generally see Gwynn, Frederick L., ‘Faulkner's Prufrock—and Other Observations’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LII (01 1953), 63–70Google Scholar. The following are two articles which relate Eliot's influence on two Faulkner novels, The Sound and the Fury and Pylon respectively: Fasel, Ida, ‘A “Conversation” between Faulkner and Eliot”, Mississippi Quarterly, xx (Fall 1967), 195–207Google Scholar, and Torchiana, Donald T., ‘The Reporter in Faulkner's Pylon’, History of Ideas Newsletter, IV (Spring 1958), 33–9.Google Scholar

page 96 note 1 First English language version published Edinburgh, 1871. Edition commonly used in the twenties was translated by Van Laun, H. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1920, 4 vols.).Google Scholar

page 96 note 2 A Modern Book of Criticisms, ed. Lewisohn, Ludwig (New York: Modern Library, 1919), pp. 21–2, 30, 107–11, 125 and 126Google Scholar. All page references are to this edition. Coincidentally, it is interesting to note that one of Faulkner's own critics, Holman, C. Hugh, has explicitly adopted Taine's coda to investigate Faulkner's position as a Southern writer in Three Modes of Southern Literature: Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966), pp. 27–37 especially.Google Scholar

page 97 note 1 See Santayana's ‘The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy’ (1911) and other essays collected by Wilson, Douglas L. in The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).Google Scholar Wilson offers an excellent introduction in which he documents the influence of Santayana's thought on Van Wyck Brooks and others.

page 97 note 2 See books listed in A Catalogue, pp. 94 and 123.

page 98 note 1 It seems probable, for example, that he knew also Stearns, Harold E.'s controversial collection, Civilization in The United States (New York and London: Cape, 1922)Google Scholar, to which several of the same American figures—Brooks, Mencken, Spingarn—contributed; in it Spingarn mentions A Modern Book (p. 535). The same might be said of Brooks's ‘America's Coming-of-Age’.

page 99 note 1 Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926–1962, ed. by Meri-wether, James B. and Millgate, Michael (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 255.Google Scholar

page 99 note 2 Faulkner in the University, ed. by Gwyn, Frederick L. and Blotner, Joseph L. (New York: Vintage edition, 1965), p. 20Google Scholar. Beer, , The Mauve Decade (New York: Knopf, 1926), especially the chapter ‘American Magazines’.Google Scholar

page 100 note 1 The Unvanquished (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 18.Google Scholar

page 100 note 2 Published in Uncle Willy and Other Stories, vol. I of the British edition of the Collected Short Stories (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), p. 257.

page 100 note 3 Knight's Gambit (New York: Random House, 1949), p. 164.Google Scholar Other page references are to this edition.

page 101 note 1 Sanctuary (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1947), p. 359.Google Scholar Lacking Stevens's gift, I have been unable to trace the line's origin.

page 101 note 2 See ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1890: reprinted in Poems and Essays, London: Collins, 1956), p. 317: ‘We weep but we are not wounded. We grieve but our grief is not bitter’.

page 101 note 3 London: Chatto and Windus, 1961, p. 360.

page 101 note 4 Intruder in the Dust, p. 195. ‘To the Dead Favourite of Liu Ch'e’, The Dial, LXVIII (04 1920), 444.Google Scholar

page 101 note 5 London: Chatto and Windus, 1965, p. 273. I have been unable to locate the expression in Djuna Barnes's work, but Faulkner himself gave Barnes as the source (Faulkner in the University, p. 201).

page 101 note 6 Ibid. p. 120.